DEBTS AND TAXES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 April 1940, Page 5

DEBTS AND TAXES

NAZI GERMANY’S MOUNTING BURDENS HUGE INCREASE IN NOTE ISSUE. HARDSHIPS & DEPRIVATIONS INTENSIFIED. ' By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. LONDON, April 4. The Reichsbank return for the week ended March 30 reveals that the note circulation has increased by 049.000,000 marks, making the total 13,000.000,000 marks, four times greater than in 1933. reports Rotterdam. The Hitler regime has also quadrupled taxation and trebled the public debt, all of which is concealed from the public. A Daventry report says that another piece of cold comfort for the German nation is the news that Hitler’s grandiose old age pension scheme has been postponed until after the war.

Meanwhile, the State of Prussia has made a special contribution in money toward the cost of the war. and to provide the sum ordinary expenditure has been heavily cut. German householders, who only recently stopped shivering from the cold of the winter, have now been thrown into a state of hot indignation by an announcement by the German wireless that they must begin at once to buy and store the quantity of coal to be allowed for next winter. The ration for next winter has not yet been fixed, but houses with central heating are to get enough coal for hot water on only two days of the week. The Germans are asking why their country, which possesses the largest coal supplies in Europe, should find it necessary to announce that there will be another coal shortage next winter.

The collection of scrap metal all over Germany as a birthday present for Herr Hitler has revealed what would appear to amount to a mania by the Germans for collecting busts. To the scrap heap in this way have gone from many homes busts of the exKaiser and other German figures, including even Herr Hitler himself. To add to the troubles of the German farmers, they were warned by the wireless today that there is grave fear that many German pigs are going to get German measles. Farmers were urged to inoculate pigs as soon as possible, because, in the words of an official of the Ministry of Agriculture, “our national wealth is endangered to the extent of 38,000,000 marks if pigs are not made immune before the summer.”